My newest column has been posted at Slaw, Canada’s best legal website. As always, you can read it there, or read it here.
Posts Categorized: Solo & Small Firm
The firms of the future
“Does the future belong to virtual law firms?” That question was posed by an American Lawyer article earlier this week that focused on Virtual Law Partners, a growing firm nominally based in Silicon Valley but in fact operating, well, wherever its lawyers are. Virtual firms — two others, FSB Legal Counsel and Rimon Law Group,… Read more »
Free and the GP
Like Thomas Friedman and Malcolm Gladwell before him, Chris Anderson is becoming known for books that identify and name an evolving trend that connects business and society. You’ve probably read or head about his newest book Free: the Future of a Radical Price. It’s generating a tremendous amount of heat around the idea that the… Read more »
The new leverage
Bad news on the economic front continues to pile up — you don’t need the links from me — and the legal profession is finding its ride increasingly bumpy as a result. Wachovia’s legal specialty group reports that partners in large law firms are bringing in less revenue for the first time since approximately the… Read more »
We are all solos
Law firms ask a lot from their lawyers: work hard for long hours, respond immediately to clients and colleagues, accept and promote the firm’s culture, support overall firm profitability, and so forth. But law firms give a lot back, too: steady income and predictable bonuses, centralized resources, shared overhead costs, exposure to clients, and general… Read more »
How David beat Goliath
Reading to my three-year-old from her new book Bible Stories for Toddlers last night, I was struck by something about the story of David and Goliath that I hadn’t fully appreciated before. David is often held up as a symbol of bravery in the face of insurmountable odds, as well as the power of divine… Read more »
Book review: Solo by Choice
This is the first in what I hope will be a more than occasional foray into book reviews at Law21. There are so many good titles out there now that deal with law practice issues in an innovative way that I’d like to bring some of them to your attention. I have a few more… Read more »
Takeaways from TECHSHOW
The kid is back from the candy store known as ABA TECHSHOW. This was my first trip in two years, and probably the best of the shows I’ve attended so far. I met up with old friends, made some new ones, and managed to avoid most of the St. Patrick’s Day revellers at the Chicago… Read more »
Virtually legal
I’ve just assigned a feature article for the April/May 2008 issue of National that aims to explore the future of the sole practitioner. As I noted in a previous post, I’m worried about the near-term prospects for solos, especially in smaller centers, but I’m bullish on their chances down the road, so long as they’re… Read more »
Law firm size: past, present and future
After making an offhand comment in a previous post, that only about 10% of all Canadian lawyers were in large law firms, I began to wonder if that was, you know, accurate. So I checked the statistical breakdowns available at the Federation of Law Societies of Canada website and confirmed that yes, out of 79,147… Read more »